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BenQ CD Burner Problem

Back when I bought my first computer 4 years back, I cheaped out and didn't get a CD-writer. The system I bought was from a local shop that used mostly Acer/AOpen parts. When I broke down 6 months later and bought a CD-writer at Future Shop, I went with Acer (to keep with my system "theme"). Fast forward to last year when I built a new system with some better quality parts, although I recycled the CD-writer among a few other parts. About 2 months before my extended warrantly ended, the CD-writer gave up and I returned it for a replacement. They ended up replacing it with a BenQ (I guess Acer's new brand name). I've had nothing but trouble with this drive. This includes:

1. It's a 32X writer, but neither Nero nor Easy CD Creator can go over 16X no matter what type/speed media I use. I've tried Maxell, Memorex and a bunch of cheapos ranging from 24X to 48X.
2. With the Memorex media (of which I have 50 blanks, of two different sppeds), they can only be written on using Nero and the CD must be finalized (it hangs for 10 minutes while it finalized the CD) . It doesn't matter what speed you try it at. Also, once it completes, the CD cannot be read in the CD-writer, only in my DVD-ROM. But the cheapo Gigastores burn fine every time as do the Maxell's.

These are the major problems with it. Yes, I've tried Googling for solutions with no luck. Also the BenQ site offers no help. I'd like to take it back and get it replaced with an LG or Plextor or something better but the store is close to 2 hours away and I won't be back there for about a month. If anyone has any experiences with these, please let me know.

Thank you very much!

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Copying compressed or copy-writed files (i.e. zip, mp3, avi, mpg, jpg, ...) : When copying compressed or copy-writed files, the software burning program needs to spend extra time to uncompress or decode the files. This will result in slower burning speeds. You should slow down the writing speed when attempting to copy these files.

Fragmented harddrive: Files being copied from the harddrive may be taking too long for the harddrive to find. Run Scandisk (Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000 only) and Disk Defragmenter about every month as routine harddrive maintenance. (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools)

Source and destination drives on same IDE cable: if the CD-RW is on the same IDE cable as the source drive (i.e. hard drive, CD-ROM, ...) the transfer speed will be decreased. Best results are found when connecting the CD-R/RW drive to the IDE cable other than the IDE cable with your main hard drive.

Bottleneck along the source drive, IDE channel, and destination drive data pathline: Data may be slowing down along this path due to selecting copy speed from the source or writing speed for the destination drive as too high. To correct this problem, slow down the reading and writing speeds of the drives. Also, creating a disk image onto your harddrive will nearly eliminate this problem, make sure there is enough free harddrive space to hold a copy of the contents copied to the CDR disc.

Transfer mode settings may be incorrect: The IDE transfer mode settings may be incorrect. All Acer/BenQ CD-R/RW drives use PIO transfer mode and not DMA. Change these settings in Device Manager for your drive and IDE channel with the drive.

Have you tried flashing the FIRMWARE for it? You would proberbly be able to get it from the manufactures web site.

Also have you got Clone CD installed with the Virtual CD drive?
I installed this a while ago and had ALL the problems you are having and more, once i un-installed it though everything was back to normal!!

Have you tried flashing the FIRMWARE for it? You would proberbly be able to get it from the manufactures web site.

Yes I have done this

Also have you got Clone CD installed with the Virtual CD drive?

No I do not.

Do you have it set as a Primary/secondary slave or master?

It is set as secondary slave

spools.exe

Copying compressed or copy-writed files (i.e. zip, mp3, avi, mpg, jpg, ...) : When copying compressed or copy-writed files, the software burning program needs to spend extra time to uncompress or decode the files. This will result in slower burning speeds. You should slow down the writing speed when attempting to copy these files.

It should still let me choose a faster burning speed though shouldn't it?

Fragmented harddrive: Files being copied from the harddrive may be taking too long for the harddrive to find. Run Scandisk (Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000 only) and Disk Defragmenter about every month as routine harddrive maintenance. (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools)

I am running 2000 and I do run it every month or so on my FAT32 drives (which is where I am copying the data from)

Source and destination drives on same IDE cable: if the CD-RW is on the same IDE cable as the source drive (i.e. hard drive, CD-ROM, ...) the transfer speed will be decreased. Best results are found when connecting the CD-R/RW drive to the IDE cable other than the IDE cable with your main hard drive.

My harddisk is primary master and as I said above the CD-RW is secondary slave

Bottleneck along the source drive, IDE channel, and destination drive data pathline: Data may be slowing down along this path due to selecting copy speed from the source or writing speed for the destination drive as too high. To correct this problem, slow down the reading and writing speeds of the drives. Also, creating a disk image onto your harddrive will nearly eliminate this problem, make sure there is enough free harddrive space to hold a copy of the contents copied to the CDR disc.

I've tested with very small files though ~15MB and still get the same problems.

Transfer mode settings may be incorrect: The IDE transfer mode settings may be incorrect. All Acer/BenQ CD-R/RW drives use PIO transfer mode and not DMA. Change these settings in Device Manager for your drive and IDE channel with the drive.

In my BIOS the CD-RW was set to PIO mode 4, but in Windows it was set to DMA. I wouldn't have checked that if you had not suggested it.

I changed the IDE transfer mode to PIO from DMA but I am still receiving errors when I attempted to burn on Memorex CDs. These are the same errors as before. Attached is a partial screen shot of the errors given by Nero. These errors are given before the CD burn is completed. Progress gets to 3%, then it hangs for ~1 minute and then these errors appear. During this test I did a speed measurment and a simulation burn that were both successful. Any ideas??

Just a thought: a lot of programs that use a cd-rom drive have some trouble if you don't have good apsi drivers. Try installing Force ASPI; it won't hurt your com and might solve a few problems. I needed it to get some other burning/ripping programs to work.